In an era of massive scale companies and giant projects, it's fascinating how often it feels like most of the success of a project or company's big successes ultimately hinge on the actions of a few key individuals in the right place at the right time - and it never fails to surprise me how little overlap these individuals and the actual actual company org charts share.
Org charts are structured around running the company day to day. The surprising one-off big boosts from an individual are by definition not reflected in an org chart.
> If Sega had held onto that Nvidia stock from then... ChatGPT tells me: "So, if you invested $5 million in Nvidia stock at its IPO in 1999, it would be worth approximately $3 billion today, assuming a current share price of $450 and accounting for stock splits."
why not just either do the math yourself or not include it at all? I don’t find GPT math about realtime prices and such to be even slightly reliable given the; market fluctuations , latest training data & of course the hallucinations.
I just put an asterisk on the number and moved on. Even without the exact number, I was reminded that 5 million in 1999 value for a company who's crown jewel was what, the riva tnt 2, means a serious amount of the company's worth now.
There were so many excellent touches and insights in the documentary. And I got goosebumps in a couple of places.
Also the Half-Life documentary they released last year was one hour long. The Half-Life 2 documentary is two hours long. I sure doesn't feel like 2 hours.
Highly recommended. (There are manual English subtitles included that seem perfect too, if you need them.)
These documentaries are nice but I feel they're missing something by being commissioned. Obviously they don't contain any criticism about Valve, but is it still documentary or just marketing material?
In this era of marketing and polish, honesty I don't really take anything from big companies or 'big people' at face value. Everything is scripted and wordsmithed within an inch of its life.
Even if something was genuine...it's hard to tell.
It's food for thought that something as groundbreaking as HL2 and Steam almost didn't see the light of day and the developers only survived by the skin of their teeth. In some nearby universe the games industry looks very different and sometimes people go "remember Half-Life? It's a shame Valve went out of business and the sequel was canceled."
I wonder what other amazing things we missed out on because of political backstabbing, or one-sided corporate lawsuits, or crime and fraud? We'll never know, because those projects don't get documentaries made about them 20 years later.
It's also a food for thought that we almost certainly are in that timeline in other areas too. Take your chosen Hawk button issue like net neutrality, walled gardens, anti-competitive acquisitions, or some of the more outright antitrust agreements such as those that are displayed in the recent Google lawsuit (do business with us and be forced to sign an agreement to shut out all of our direct competition, ex: offer a non-Google Android fork and get banned from offering the Play Store on all of the company's devices).
Practices like abuse of the legal system have deleterious effects in our specific timeline, but I've always thought that for so many things, It's the opportunity cost that dominates. So many fruitful branches get snipped at the bud. Yes, as you said, we'll never know, but maybe it's something we should talk about more. What it could look like. It doesn't have to be done with an ideological approach. Looking at higher order effects can help see true costs and benefits.
Edit: I'm not fixing that Auto-correct. This post has a Hawk button. Press it, I dare you...
Butterfly effect is hard to comprehend isn't it? My favorite tangential stat (adding a little bit of path dependence to the conceptual stew) is the huge difference in outcomes between holding a kid back from first grade or not.
For some reason that's something I was always keyed into, even as a little kid. I've always hyper fixated on these possibility nexuses, and had a hard time caring about times when it's hard to break through the walls. Those moments when the threads of fate cross are just so important in the world, and it really is a fundamental phenomenon.
For every Valve saved we have thousands of other being buried. This still happens every day and it works differently from the article more often than not. This strategy is what a lot of big companies with deep pockets use to quash something even when they're in the wrong.
> "The next thing we know, here comes this big stack of counter-claims," said Valve general counsel Karl Quackenbush. "Everything from canceling the 2001 agreement, to obtaining ownership of all the Half-Life IP, to keeping us from doing Steam."
> "We're gonna put Valve out of business, and we're gonna bankrupt the two of you," Lynch said of Vivendi's strategy.
The threat of being litigated into the ground by someone with more money for lawyers is a great truth and competition burying tool and it's used every day.
>In some nearby universe the games industry looks very different and sometimes people go "remember Half-Life? It's a shame Valve went out of business and the sequel was canceled."
Meanwhile in the current universe, we sometimes go "Remember Half-Life? It's a shame Valve became a massive success and the sequel was cancelled."
It's totally normal for corporations to go after business executives personally in civil cases, but it's also usually pretty easy for those targeted executives to have the claims against them dismissed. Typically it's just an intimidation tactic.
Those words are synonyms. What you seem to be objecting to is that it should not be normal or common. But it is. “Normal” doesn’t mean “acceptable” or “neutral”, it means “standard”, “usual”, “typical”, “expected”, “common”. Slavery was never ethical or good, but at a point in history it was normal.
Don’t avoid what is in front of you. Do fight for a better normal but recognise when something you disapprove of is the current normal.
You might want to think about this this other way.
If you were severely harmed by the actions of a specific person who happened to also be a business executive, should you be allowed to pursue that business executive in court?
Let’s say for example a wealthy man decides, for his personal amusement, to bulldoze your home. The bulldozer is owned by a LLC with no assets or insurance but the man is very rich. Should you be allowed to sue him personally?
How about if a family decides to engage in purposeful behavior in selling a deadly addictive drug that kills hundreds of thousands of people, making billions of dollars. Should they be allowed to walk away?
The “strange” convention that we adhere to is that we let people shield themselves from the consequences of their behavior behind corporate structures. Not the other way around.
The least we can do is ask them to show up in court and explain why that legal fiction should apply to them.
These days, sadly, ethical behavior has almost nothing to do with the civil courts. Even in the article at OP, you can see how cases become little more than battles of financial attrition, with tactics (like dumping millions of foreign-language documents) designed to force your opponent to spend huge sums of money in the hopes of forcing a settlement.
If you enjoy reading business biographies like me you'll find that gangster tactics like deployed by Vivendi against Valve are surprisingly common. The smaller business has essentially no recourse when faced with an opponent like Vivendi. The courts are unable to hold big businesses to account because (a) diffusion of responsibility and (b) when found guilty the fines are as threatening as a parking ticket.
In this specific case Gabe Newell fought and miraculously won, but gaben is the exception and most businesses are (rightly) afraid to fight Goliath and that's a big loss to society.
I think current LLMs would be completely lost with the task "scan these documents for information that could be risky for our case": they would either produce tons of false positives, overlook actual risks, or both.
I can personally attest that companies are already using those LLM-based workflows for those exact purposes successfully, performing better than humans, which often isn't a super high bar.
At least you can reasonably use them for translation and in a second pass summarize or just have it detect if a document contains specific keywords / phrases.
Suppose the source language has words which could be translated into multiple English words -- look at all the power banks which are advertised as charging treasure for example. One can see how bank vs treasure are close, after all. Further, even in English multiple phrases could be used "don't preserve" "bin it" "throw it away" and countless others. Even worse, it could be a company specific phrase which would only stand out as odd "apply procedure 66 to it".
If given a little thought this is exactly the kind of task where a native speaker would shine and LLM might just miss or if given a wide enough net produce a million false positive.
Sure! But in any case, it's worth a shot to preprocess document dumps with AI first - if it fails to spot anything obvious, you can still go and have humans sift through the pile manually, whereas if it does spot something humans can immediately zero in instead of wasting their time.
AI is a tool, nothing more, nothing less. It is smart to use it when it makes sense, it is dumb to shoehorn it into something it by definition cannot do.
Just tested out the treasure idea and seems to work fine in ChatGPT. I suspect if given context at the task at hand that the LLM would provide a pretty decent first pass.
What a weird response. Just providing a counterpoint to your idea that I don't believe is correct. I hope dang does not delete your account because I am not sure whats going on here and I hope you find the help/peace you need.
I listed like half a dozen things that could go wrong and the only reply is "look this particular one in this singular case the bullshit is accidentally correct".
Ouch, sorry you are in distress but let me repeat and help flesh it out for you. You would be surprised that when given the context at hand, the level of confusion would be a lot less than your constrained world model envisions. I have been pleasantly surprised with LLMs ability to translate, including legal documents. Should it be the only step in the process? No. Like I originally pointed out, I think a LLM can serve quite well in initial first passes. Its quite naive to hand wave it away with some what-if scenarios and then just become a dismissive immature kid when someone disagrees with you. I can only imagine when you have a corpus to work from of existing legal documents especially for translations, that you get quite close to the spirit of whats written.
You might be caught off guard then because its already happening successfully. There is a lot of overblown hype but systems already exist that do a pretty good job on first passes and other work that paralegals/juniors would be doing. I know this goes against the anti-LLM narrative here but don't be surprised as it happens.
On the other hand, perhaps the summer intern would have had an easier time finding something (and the defense more time to spot potential gaps in their arguments).
But false negatives would not have been, and you don’t have the luxury of choice. Even if the LLM had highlighted twenty matches, there’s no guarantee the one good one would be in there, it might just as well have made twenty false positives.
I think that’s within reach of many non-tiny companies. You don’t need to hire someone full time – technical translation work is a service you can already pay for.
My hate for Vivendi and his owner, Vincent Bolloré, grows every time I read about either of them. He is a known far-right billionaire attempting to get his hands on the most media he can, to push his fascist agenda in France. That his company uses scummy practices to bully smaller ones in court is not really surprising.
I mean, all the intern did was comb through some documents in his native language. I’m sure if he weren’t there, they would’ve just hired a translator (much cheaper than lawyers). Not to disparage the work they did or anything.
The really remarkable “hero” here is the Korean junior executive who stupidly mentioned destroying evidence on the record.
Ok, imagine the following: you are a (young and probably underpaid) summer intern; you suddenly get the task to drop whatever else you were doing (which was probably more interesting) and read through megabytes of mind-numbing documents; you have little to no personal "skin in the game"; and still, you somehow manage to muster the motivation to pay enough attention so you are able to spot the one interesting email among the thousands of irrelevant ones. Does it sound more remarkable now?
I think the previous user is merely pointing out the abuse of words we see in news reporting, "hero" here being the word.
If Valve would've just hired a translator and achieved the same would've we called the translator a hero? Meaning "worthy of admiration due to incredible achievements"?
If being tasked with reading documents and doing so during an internship and just doing the job you're paid for is heroism, that's a very very low bar for heroism we have, I'm scared to hear what's the definition for "professionalism".
Hero wasn't used in the article, only in the comments here. Nor did they say that it was anything but luck in the documentary, as they had an intern that knew Korean and was able to find the one document that saved them after looking at less than 1% of them. Valve was on the brink of bankruptcy (Gabe was about to/did put his house on the market), if they needed to hire translator to look over the documents they might not have had the same luck and Vivaldis plan might have worked.
It's also strange that the Korean side didn't destroy that evidence and handed it over in discovery. Most companies who destroy evidence at least try to do a decent job and go all the way. If the servers and individuals responsible were in Korea, an American civil suit would have a hard time reaching them.
I assume most company executives are not experts at evidence destruction. And in this case, it seems that they destroyed all of the documents and then just sent out a "We've now destroyed everything you asked us" email reply back without thinking to include that in the list of things to destroy.
When the command comes to destroy evidence, the company already unravels. The CEOS and upper echelons do no longer hold the power of career life and death, instead they are just "visibly" pawns in the larger game of society, playing "prison" or "no prison". In that moment, even the most loyal individual realizes that the game is lost- and that deleting evidence that proofs your innocence, would increment you for nothing.
Thus that command - is never followed. There are always copies of the bad shit everywhere. The underlings are not that stupid.
Yeah no, this is such a silly take on the situation. Finding anything useful in literally millions of pages of arbitrary documents, when you don't even know if there is anything useful, is an amazing feat. "Just" hiring a translator could also be prohibitively expensive at this volume when your company is already on the verge of bankruptcy. Even running a regular text search across millions of pages of what was probably a mix of emails, word documents, pdfs, etc takes a while today, never mind in the early 2000s. Keep in mind that this was probably an intern on what was a regular computer at the time, not some fancy distributed compute cluster. Finding anything useful in that pile is a gargantuan feat, even if there was no language barrier.
TLDR: a summer intern who spoke Korean was able to find a single email in a million pages of document for a rather malicious counterlawsuit made against Valve because the other company, Vivendi was distributing Valve IP outside of the discussed regions and Valve sued them for that.
